Do you need to capture a webpage bigger than your screen? Try wpic

Capturing an image of a small webpage is easy. Open it in a browser, press Alt+PrtSc, paste the results into your graphics tool of choice, edit and save the results: it’s all over in a moment. Of course, if the page is too large to view on your display then all that scrolling means capturing it all becomes a little more challenging. But wpic, a new tool from woanware, may be able to help.

We say “may” because wpic is a console tool, with no concessions whatsoever to interactivity. If you launch the program then it won’t ask you for a URL or output file; instead you must specify them on the command line, very precisely (make the slightest error and it’ll complain with an unhelpful message), something like this.

wpic.exe -u http://www.site.com -o pic.png

And so this isn’t exactly the most convenient solution for ad-hoc screen grabbing.

If you need to regularly capture an image of the same page, though, it’s a very different story. It’s easy to automate wpic, to run it in scripts, scheduled tasks, when your PC boots and so on. And unlike regular screen capture tools, the program only runs when necessary, so it’s not wasting RAM, cluttering your system with icons or otherwise getting in your way.

But best of all, wpic is based on the Chromium project, and that means you can be confident that your target page will be rendered accurately, if perhaps a little slowly. We ran the above command on a fast PC with a speedy SSD and 10Mbps Internet connection and it still took 22 seconds to launch, fetch the page and convert it to an image.

Wpic isn’t exactly a beacon of user-friendliness, then. But it’s free, portable, and proved reliable when rendering our test pages, so if you frequently need to capture the same page (or pages) then the program could prove very useful.